OF ALL THE mistakes a British foreign correspondent can make when out in the field, there is only one that can forever tarnish his (or her) career, and result in an order to get on the next plane home.

It is a professional offence so unforgivable — borderline treacherous, almost — that I had to think long and hard before even mentioning it here. And yet, after the unsettling events of this week, I feel compelled to share with you this unique peril of the overseas assignment: “going native”.

The very phrase brings to mind Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Every day in Los Angeles, I live in fear of doing a Kurtz — of being claimed by the urban jungle as one of its own. “You’ve got to remember, old boy,” as a friend on The Sunday Times once warned me. “They’re the bloody foreigners, not you.”

And yet this week, I feared it had finally happened. I suppose it was a long time coming: the American wife, the Green Card, the mortgage, and now this. The realisation came as I was preparing to leave home, and trying to decide on the most appropriate footwear. Glancing down, I saw my options laid out on the floor: not one, not two, not three, but four pairs of brightly coloured flip-flops.

It gets worse: my smartest pair, from Paul Smith on Melrose Avenue, had set me back $165 (in a sale).

Suddenly aware of the lunacy, I imagined a klaxon going off in London, and the voice of my Editor, ringing out across the newsroom: “Ayres is exposing his feet! Send out the recall papers! He’s gone native!”

Back when I first arrived in Los Angeles, of course, I would never have considered wearing any kind of shoe that didn’t require the use of a heavy black M&S sock. Charmingly, I would turn up to outdoor lunch meetings wearing polished lace-ups and a woollen pin-stripe, my body temperature creating a heat-ripple that distorted the air for miles around.

It didn’t last. Tired of passing out over coffee, I downgraded to khakis and loafers. Even then, however, the spectre of Kurtz loomed. But the heat was so much, I didn’t care. And when the loafers turned into a gateway shoe for less casual footwear, I barely noticed.

In my defence, flip-flops have become to West Coast business wear what polo shirts and chinos once were. Smart casual is the new smart. That means casual can now involve exposing a greater percentage of your naked flesh than is actually covered, even for middle-aged men. These days, actors wear flip-flops on the red carpet. CEOs wear them to the office. And although it’s easy to spend up to $300 on designer foot-thongs, the most popular kind remain rubber-soled Havaianas, which cost only $16 (or $50, if you want a rhinestone between the toes). Havaianas are perfect for the A.D.D. generation: they’re cheap enough to have a new pair for every day of the week.

Chiropodists, of course, are trying to spoil the fun: they argue that flip-flops don’t support the foot and don’t absorb shock, making it easy for wearers to twist their ankles. In Los Angeles, however, this rather misses the point: people here drive, they don’t walk.

Yet the flip-flop is also dramatically unsuited to the task of operating an accelerator pedal, given that the shoe itself is a kind of pedal. You would have thought that LA pedestrians could at least run to avoid flip-flop-operated vehicles, but alas they too wear flip-flops, making it impossible to do anything other than shuffle forward slowly with an irritating clacking sound.

You can imagine my torment: as The Times’s man in LA, I should have remained immune to this Angeleno fad. But I had shown weakness; I had failed in my primary responsibility.

And so when an English journalist friend flew into the city this week for a book tour, I was ready to come clean.

We met in a hotel bar, just off Sunset Strip. My confession was already under way when I glanced down, and almost fell off my chair. Yes, my friend had arrived from London wearing a Thomas Pink shirt, pin-striped blazer, jeans . . . and flip-flops.

“They’re all the rage in England,” he explained.

And that, I suppose, is the joy of this city. You can go native all you want, because the rest of the world is never far behind.

Read previous LA Notebooks by Chris Ayres here

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